“DREAMS of Joy” celebrates the new works of veteran expressionist and naïf painter Mario Parial.

The show opens Feb. 27, 7 p.m., in Galerie Raphael, 2/L, The Piazza, Serendra Mall, Bonifacio Global City, Taguig.

Part of the generation of expressionists coming from the University of Santo Tomas College of Fine Arts during the late 1950s, which include National Artist Ang Kiukok, Leon Pacunayen, Antonio Austria, Angelito Antonio and Norma Belleza, Parial shares similar concerns of translating the alienating voice of Western Modernism into a distinctly Asian avatar that dispels despair from modern life, reworks grief into joy, and recapitulates the strength of the rural countryside as the source of animated energy, with Nature at its full powers of productive creation.

This is especially seen in the new set of works in which Parial loosens somewhat the grip that his famed series of women vendors has sustained in the public imagination since the ’80s, and revels instead in the allusions toward the mythological, the art historical, as well as the delightfully realized everyday of carefree innocence.

What makes Parial’s “Dreams of Joy” both exciting and worthy of the visit is its evocation toward a legendary tradition in modernist artmaking, and the crucial transformation and reworking of this practice into the idioms, folkways and traditions that Filipinos, as well as others whose sense of joie de vivre is unmistakable, display in every part of their life.

For this, Parial’s works challenge the modernist notions of alienation and anti-sociality that have often gripped Western art, and allow the community to once more dream of its ideal paradise unperturbed by the despair found only at the end of isolated introspection.

Call 8563034 or visit www.galeriejoaquin.com.